John Brown - Hero or Terrorist

John Brown was born on 9 May 1800 in Torrington in the state of Connecticut in the United States and hanged on 16 December 1859 at Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia ), was an abolitionist, who appealed to the insurgency army to abolish slavery. He is the author of the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in Kansas and an attempt to bloody uprising in Harpers Ferry in 1859 which ended with his arrest, his condemnation to death for treason against the State of Virginia and his hanging. President Abraham Lincoln described it as a "fanatic". Activism Bloody John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and its tragic outcome are among the causes of the American Civil War. Contemporary personality and controversial history, John Brown is well described both as a martyr or a terrorist, a visionary or a fanatic, a zealot or a humanist. The song John Brown's Body (original title Battle Hymn of the Republic) became an anthem during the Yankee Civil War. The son of a Calvinist, at the age of twelve, he is brought to browse Michigan, where he will stay in a man who owned a slave. He attends the violence he inflicted upon the Negro slave; these scenes based commitment, provided the beliefs of his father.

He was also a time, Freemason, an association he then leaves. In 1837, after the assassination of his friend who was the director of an abolitionist newspaper, Brown's mission was to eradicate slavery. Brown is an entrepreneur by trade, but it encounters great difficulties and professional bankrupt more than twenty times in six different states. It is deep in debt but believed to be the messenger of God on Earth. In 1847, he met Frederick Douglass; former slave became black orator and statesman (he ran as vice-chair of the United States). He settled in 1849 in a black community of New York. Its action becomes more violent from 1855: helped five of his son, he left in Kansas. It helped for that, financially, by many abolitionists. He met the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who devotes him thereafter, a boundless admiration and takes an active part against the slavery (many conferences and assistance to fugitives). In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek, they massacred five settlers slavery by the sword on the grounds that they are his "legions of Satan." At the Battle of Osawatomie, in Kansas, he defended the village against 400 armed men. A few years later, in 1859, John Brown is planning an uprising of slaves with the help of some supporters, he seizes an arsenal federal Virginia to launch the uprising (16 October 1859). The revolt ended in disaster: no slave joins him and Brown was seriously wounded by several bullets, two of his son was killed. He was arrested and tried for treason, convicted and hanged Dec. 16, 1859.

It will become a symbol of the struggle for the abolition of slavery. The Battle of Osawatomie earned him a statue in the city, and ...